Spotify apps dominate at Music Hack Day London

London's hacking community descended on the Barbican Centre on 3
and 4 December for 24 hours of music app speed-coding, marking the
third London Music Hack Day in three years.

What a difference a month makes. Back in November, during Boston Music Hack Day, Spotify was nowhere to be seen -- only
two hacks out of 56 took advantages of the music streaming
service's API. Since then, the company has thrown its doors wide
open to developers. It announced an application platform on 30
November, complete with a selection of apps to start off with.

The result of that move? 16 of the 61 apps, more than one in
four, took advantage of Spotify's new functionality. There were
apps to turn Spotify into a jukebox, apps to share your Spotify
listening with other people, apps to meet people with similar music
taste through Spotify, and apps to create playlists in just about
every different way under the sun.

That's not all, though. Elsewhere there was a helicopter crossed
with a theremin, a quartet of iPhones singing Bohemian
Rhapsody, a distributed synthesiser, and a keyboard made of
owls. You can find the full list right here, but for those starved of time, here are a few of
our favourites.

CTRL
DJing is pretty dull to watch. Whoever's standing behind the decks
just fiddles with a series of buttons and knobs, occasionally
bobbing their head along. CTRL changes all of that. It allows you
to add glitchers, delays, filters and reverse effects, tempo-synced
to any music that can be found on Spotify. You can also overlay a
synthesiser matched to the key of the song and hook up stage lights
to flash in time.

The method of interaction is a pair of iPhones running OSC
apps. Making different motions with the iPhone, turning it upside
down, swinging it through the air, and pressing various buttons on
the screen will trigger the different effects, rather like a
simpler version of Imogen Heap's famous gloves.

The result? Adding effects to music becomes a much more physical
process, more akin to dance than playing Minesweeper. "The
solo synthesiser will make even the most unmusical person sound
like Hendrix," say creators Yuli Levtov and Ragnar Hrafkelsson
on the hack's wiki
entry.

Chordify
Learning how to play a song on guitar used to mean working it out
yourself, or learning it from a friend. Then it meant trawling
through music stores for tab books. Then it meant looking up guitar
tabs on a selection of increasingly dodgy-looking websites. The
next Jimmy Page will have it easy, because he'll be able to use Chordify.

It's a Spotify app that looks at what you're playing, and then
attempts to find it on Chordie.com -- a website that
tracks guitar chords for a wide range of popular songs. If it finds
a match that's valid, it'll send it to the app, which cleans it up,
formats it nicely, and puts it into the Spotify window. All the
user has to do is play the song, then open the app, and they'll be
able to strum along to their heart's content.

Unfortunately, guitar tabs are in a murky area when it comes to
copyright, and about half the popular songs' chords aren't
available in the UK for legal reasons. Still, with a better,
licensed, source of data, Chordify could change how kids learn to
play guitar.

Comments

Nice article Duncan. Up until recently, I was using the free Spotify service and finally succumbed to upgrading it to the premium service after a recent kitchen re-fit that included the installation of ceiling speakers.I find the Spotify UI very reliable and simple to use and with the release of the Spotify developer API, this should really start to extend functionality.As a freelance developer myself at www.dataintegrationsolutions.co.uk, I am definitely going to have a good look at the Spotify API on offer.